At Hearing, Plame Rebukes Bush Administration

Former CIA officer Valerie Plame, left, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, arrive for a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington in this July 14, 2006, file photo. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson, File) (Lawrence Jackson - AP)

"It's a terrible thing that any CIA operative would be outed," he said later. However, there is no evidence that anyone who leaked her name "had any idea that she was a covert agent," he asserted.

Testifying after Plame, Victoria Toensing, a criminal defense lawyer, maintained that Plame "was not a covert agent" under the definitions of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Toensing, who helped draft the federal law to protect the identities of certain undercover intelligence agents, appeared at the request of committee Republicans. She accused the CIA of "not taking proper precautions" in protecting Plame's identity.

Under questioning from Democrats who quoted the CIA as saying Plame's affiliation with the agency was classified, Toensing acknowledged that the improper disclosure of classified information violates a 1995 executive order even if it does not contravene the 25-year-old criminal statute.

Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.) criticized the second-ranking Republican in the House, Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), for having said Plame worked in "a desk job" at the CIA at the time of the leak, in an apparent attempt to minimize the significance of it. In response to Watson's questions, Plame said an undercover CIA officer's employment is considered classified information and there is no exception for "desk jobs."

Asked about any involvement in sending her husband to Niger in 2002, Plame described for the first time publicly the circumstances that led to the fateful trip, denying that she had anything to do with the decision.

"I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I didn't have the authority," Plame said.

She said a junior officer who worked for her came to her "very upset" one day in February 2002 after receiving a phone call from someone in the vice president's office asking about the reported sale of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq. Another officer whom she did not identify overheard the conversation and knew that Wilson, her husband, "had already gone on some CIA missions previously to deal with other nuclear matters," Plame said. "And he suggested, 'Well, why don't we send Joe?' "

Plame said she was "somewhat ambivalent" about such a trip because the couple had 2-year-old twins at home at the time and she did not want to be left alone with them. "So I wasn't overjoyed with this idea," she said.

She and her colleague went to their supervisor, who asked her to invite her husband to come to CIA headquarters to discuss the matter the following week, Plame said. The supervisor also "asked me to draft a quick e-mail to the chief of our Counterproliferation Division letting him know that this might happen," she said.

That e-mail later was "taken out of context" in a July 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, then controlled by Republicans, in a way "that makes it seem as though I had suggested or recommended him," Plame said.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) asked Plame whether she had talked to a Counterproliferation Division reports officer at the CIA who was interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and allegedly said she played a role in Wilson's trip.

"Yes, Congressman," Plame replied. "And I can tell you that he came to me almost with tears in his eyes. He said his words have been twisted and distorted. He wrote a memo, and he asked a supervisor to allow him to be reinterviewed by the committee. And the memo went nowhere, and his request to be reinterviewed so that the record could be set straight was denied."

Waxman said his committee "will insist on getting that memo."

In response to other questions from Van Hollen, Plame complained that people involved in disclosing her identity still work in the administration and are entrusted with classified information.

"For one, Karl Rove clearly was involved in the leaking of my name, and he still carries a security clearance to this day despite the president's words to the contrary, that he would immediately dismiss anyone who had anything to do with this," Plame said. She referred to Bush's pledge in 2004 to fire any official found to have leaked Plame's name.

Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland (R-Ga.), one of only two Republican committee members to show up for Plame's testimony, asked her whether she and her husband are Democrats.

"Although my husband comes from a Republican family with deep roots in California, I would say he is a Democrat now," Plame said.

As for herself, she said, "Yes, Congressman, I am a Democrat."

She later said that politics had nothing to do with her actions at the CIA. "Certainly I had no political agenda at the time of my husband's trip," she said. "Joe had no political agenda. We were both looking to serve our country."